


No One Left to Blame

by foldingcranes



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: M/M, Post-Fall of Overwatch, Pre-Overwatch Recall, Strained Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-07
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-18 05:47:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28613079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foldingcranes/pseuds/foldingcranes
Summary: “You wanted to kill me,” Jack said, slowly.“Details.”“Gabe, you literally shot me in the back.”
Relationships: Reaper | Gabriel Reyes/Soldier: 76 | Jack Morrison
Comments: 10
Kudos: 89
Collections: Reaper76 Free For All Secret Santa 2020





	No One Left to Blame

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AceOfSpades22](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceOfSpades22/gifts).



> Happy holidays, Ace!!! I hope you like this lil gift :).

This was, probably, the worst idea he ever had.

Finding out about Ana being alive had been hard enough. A piece of Jack died with her the day they buried her. He was never the same after losing her, proven by his inability to keep his shit together and efficiently lead an international peacekeeping organization. Overwatch was a crashing plane, and Jack drove it straight into a freaky island the moment his friends started dropping like flies.

Ana was like a puncture. A festering wound, infected and bleeding. Jack’s heart re-shaped itself after her loss, shifted to accommodate the empty places.

And then Jack met her again, and she was _alive_ and the cavern in his chest didn’t know what to do with so much hope and so much love, but it still refilled itself. Their new mission and the time they’ve spent together trying to complete it, started the process of healing the wounds.

Now, Gabriel? That was a completely different shiftiest.

Jack left their camp around midnight, Ana snoring (“I don’t snore, Jack, you’re projecting”) in her sleeping bag, looking exhausted in the warm refuge of their tent, swaddled under the extra blanket Jack pulled on top of her. She didn’t know about the message Jack got a few days after they left Giza, the coded transcript he spent two nights deciphering.

A series of coordinates. And a simple, short message: _M180809 T10_.

Jack rolled his eyes the moment he understood the message. It was a classical Gabriel move.

**

Sometimes, Jack wondered if getting married had been a good idea.

Gabriel had been a good husband, once. Hell, Jack had been a decent husband too, at the start. The first years, even if marred by war, violence and tragedy, were the happiest: fresh out of the SEP, steel-laced veins, strong enough to survive a bullet wound. Multiple bullet wounds. Fuck, maybe a couple of tanks.

They drew comfort from each other. Soft, stolen moments at military bases, stakeouts where they pushed their sleeping bag together. The change of pace that Overwatch becoming big brought them, and the relief that Gabriel felt when the weight of leadership switched to Jack’s shoulders. They didn’t know what to do with that freedom, with the amount of time and space they had to love each other.

If losing Ana had felt like a broken rib, losing Gabriel felt like a lodged bullet in Jack’s gut: it was there, it was _always_ there, and the pain came even before the Zurich explosion, when Gabriel started to pull away slowly, steadily. Silently.

The bullet left an exit wound, in its way out of Jack’s body. In the shape of shadows, and smoke, and a bone-white mask, and a hatred that wrapped its fingers around Jack’s heart and _pulled_.

**

Gabriel picked the shittiest bar possible. He was perched in the shadows, in the corner right out of the bathroom stalls, looking hilariously out of place, clawed hands tapping on the wooden table, a full bottle of shitty beer in front of him. The place was empty, and Jack didn’t want to know if this was a case of breaking and entering, or if Gabriel took care of the patrons.

“You’re late,” Gabriel grunted. It was impossible to see his face with that damn mask covering him, but Jack knew he was annoyed just by the sound of his voice. That impatient, entitled tilt that always made him huff in exasperation.

“Nice digs,” Jack said, taking the chair across Gabriel’s. He crossed his arms, hiding his shaking hands, trying to disguise the loud beating of his heart.

Gabriel, no— Reaper leaned forward. “You got the message?”

The gun in Jack’s thigh holster felt like a brick, heavy and rough. “Mutemath, Gabe? Seriously?”

“What track, Soldier.”

“Track 10,” Jack huffed. “You couldn’t make it more obvious. Track 10, _Armistice_. Which it’s why I didn’t come here ready to shoot you.”

“Good,” Reaper said. A tense silence fell over them, and Jack suddenly felt his stomach sink with the weight of his grief. There was a time where Gabriel would have sputtered and laughed at Jack for mocking his taste in music. They would have held hands, and drank together, and they would have gone home.

Jack just wanted to go _home_.

“Just say it,” he blurted, tiredly. Angrier than he intended, tired of playing games, still shaken by Gabriel’s resurgence, the bone-white mask reminded him of that moment, years ago, when Jack crawled off the wreckage of his life work as a nameless man, as a widower. As nameless.

“Still so fucking impatient,” Reaper growled, sounding more Gabe than before. Carefully, he searched for something in his pocket, and put a purple device on the table, a purple, pixelated skull staring at him. “You should listen to me if you want to end up getting shot.”

Jack frowned under his own mask, still looking at Gabe’s device. “Why should I?”

“Because,” Gabe said, quietly, “if you ever gave a shit about what we built, about _me_ , this is your time to prove it.”

“You wanted to kill me,” Jack said, slowly.

“Details.”

“Gabe, you literally shot me in the back.”

“Jack,” without any warning, Gabe removed his mask, his decaying face finally on complete display, the corner of his mouth downturned, his brow furrowed into a frown, his eyes blood-red. “Fucking trust me.”

And Jack, like a fool, and not taking into account any of their previous painful experiences, did.

“There’s a lot you need to know. A lot of things I hid from you.”

“I know,” Jack said, in the absence of any other answers. He still remembered. The lies, the secrets, Gabe’s shifty behavior. The abyss that grew between them and turned their backs on each other, even in their own bed.

“I’m not going to apologize.”

_”I know.”_

“But I need you to know something,” Gabriel said, firmer than before, his fingers tentatively brushing Jack’s wrist, but not enough to touch him, to hold onto him.

“What,” Jack grunted. “What else should I know.”

Gabriel smiled, all teeth, canines sharp, looking the way he did before going into battle, full of manic energy.

“I’m going to fix this.”

When Jack found out that his dead husband was still alive and breathing, he never considered what a pain in the fucking ass he was going to be.

(Still. It was nice to be able to breathe again.)


End file.
